33G CHARLES STEWART PAIKSTELL [1882
Parnell, as has been already mentioned,1 had left Dublin for Paris on April 1.0. At Willesden Junction he was met by Mr. Justin McCarthy, Mr. Quin, and Mr. Frank Byrne. They had organised a public demonstration, which, however, Parnell avoided, saying that he did not consider himself free by the terms of his release to take part in any political proceedings. That same evening he had a long conversation with Mr. Justin McCarthy on Irish affairs. ' I told him/ says Parnell, ' that the tenants, all of them who could pay their rents, had done so and obtained good reductions, and that there only remained those who could not pay—the smaller tenants in arrears. That the "No Bent manifesto" had been practically withdrawn, as when the [new] Land Bill was drafted2 it had been withdrawn from circulation, and no further attempts made to get the tenants to refuse to pay their rents ; and that now the thing was to press Parliament for some legislation to assist the small tenants, some 100,000 in number I suppose, who were unable to pay their rents and who were threatened with evictions. I told him that if these tenants were evicted on any large scale the result would be great increase of crime and terrible suffering, and that I had every reason to believe that the state of the country, and the crime in the country, was entirely duo to the inability of those small and poor tenants to pay their rents, and that in self-protection they were going about, or their sons were going about, banding themselves together to intimidate the larger tenants from paying, or that they had been doing so, and that an Arrears Act would have an immediate effect in
1 Ante, p. 328.
2 A Bill" drafted Tby ParaoH in prison for llio amendment ol the
of 1881,